I recently read "A History of Japan" by Kenneth G. Henshall. Very very brief-- only 240 pages-- but recent (1999) and as far as I'm able to tell, the scholarship is quite good, and the style strikes a good balance between academic and accessible.

That is a big misconception about Wikipedia, the free editing only means that pranksters will ocassionally mess up information regarding articles about celebrities or controversial topics like the Iraq war. Topics are meant to be revised and evolve for concise and unbiased opinions, you can see evidence of that on the discussion boards. For serious research information, wiki can be considered more informative than an encyclopedia since it is constantly updated.

I used wiki as a source for my business law and macroeconomics class, when the textbook didn't have the information I needed. Teachers that tell you not to use wikipedia are living in the stone age. It is a great resource, but of course you should still be careful. It is a valuable educational tool if you know how to use that tool.

Kenitai wrote:I don't find Wikipedia to be always accurate/trustable. Any ordinary people can write an entry, so I don't trust it.

The flaw in your reasoning there is that just because any ordinary person can write an entry, it doesn't mean that any ordinary person does.

Wikipedia runs the gamut from stubs and rough draft articles written by well-intentioned (and sometimes misinformed) amateurs; to typical entries like those found in any encyclopedia, written by qualified generalists; to the crown of Wikipedia, extremely detailed articles written by specialists in their fields, impossible to get in any standard encyclopedia.

One example is the Caedmon entry. It was written by a professor of English Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Canada. Look at how it's footnoted, and includes a list of references. This is a quality article.

Wikipedia should be used, like an encyclopedia, not as a final arbiter of any discussion or the conclusion of any search, but as a start to further study. If one is interested in Japanese history and has internet access, tooling around the Japanese history pages will not only provide a lot of basic information, but will also suggest various books, articles, and websites that one could use to deepen one's knowledge. No, it's not flawless; no encyclopedia is. But it is one of the better resources we have in the modern age.

I recently bought the 3 volume "history of Japan" by George Sansom.However, since the series was written before more recent discoveries were made specially regarding the pre-Heian era, I decided to buy the outrageously expensive two first volumes of the Cambridge History of Japan (5 volumes in total).Sansom is ok to a novice like me.